Review: NOT / OUR TOWN from Pony World Theatre

Dear Readers, there's an interesting an innovative new work based on an old classic playing in Capitol Hill with Pony World Theatre's "Not / Our Town". Even as I arrived at the theater, the pre-show activities the audience must partake in were filled with promise. Unfortunately, that promise quickly waned as this "NOT / Our Town" ended up mostly being "Our Town Highlights" mixed with one of my pet peeves, someone else's therapy on stage.

The premise from writer and director Brendan Healey has potential. The nine-member cast (Tyler Campbell, Sophia Franzella, Mark Fullerton, Kathy Hsieh, Agastya Kohli, Jesse Parce, Alanah Pascual, Lisa Viertel, and Amber Walker) take Thornton Wilder's classic "Our Town" and present it based on the suggestions given in a survey the audience takes before the show. Things like what style of dance we will see. Will there be puppets used in a certain scene? Will they take on a certain scene as if written by another playwright, Pinter, Chekov, or Beckett? They make it very clear this is not improv but pre-scripted options that might arise based on the audience choices.

And while that sounds fun, and was at first, it gets largely abandoned all too quickly. The introduction gets the audience involved and laughing as they reveal the scores and choices we made. And then we're introduced to the character of Mark (Fullerton), a drama teacher who loves "Our Town", and his daughter Amber (Walker) who hates it. The two bicker over which one of them is right and how to present the story to us, but mostly end up just having the actors do scenes from the original. Occasionally they toss in one of the quirky audience choices but even they become tiresome and sometimes detrimental as one of our choices did on the night I saw it. That choice being to have the actors deliver their lines quietly into microphones which felt like a live ASMR video and sapped all the energy from the show and was putting us to sleep.

But even as they did diverge from the original Wilder play, the replacement scenes were the father and daughter arguing. Arguments that I assume were supposed to remind us how "Our Town" is all just about people's lives and here are some modern-day people with similar problems. But where Wilder was trying to show us slices of Americana, the new scenes felt like Healy exorcising his own demons. But what he needed to exorcise was the air in the play as it felt like our audience had not picked Chekov as the replacement playwright but Pinter with insane amounts of pauses throughout, especially from Fullerton.

The cast does what they can with this but it's an uphill battle. To name a few, Franzella and Pascual make for an adorable couple when portraying Emily and George. The always amazing Viertel brings in the gossipy Mrs. Soames to wonderful effect. And Parce gives us a harrowing glimpse at the drunken choir director Mr. Stimson. But those moments that bring some life into the play are just moments from the original play. Even the dance number that livened up the scene early in the play keeps coming back with the actors less and less enthusiastic about doing it for some reason. Not sure why.

And that is the main question I left the play with, "why?" Why were they doing this? What were they hoping to unearth or illuminate with this telling of the classic? Was it all just silliness to bolster up a play that some might not gravitate toward or was there something more? I honestly never found an answer for that. And so, with my three-letter rating system, I must give Pony World Theatre's production of "Not / Our Town" a perplexed and disappointed MEH-. It had some interesting moments and some potential in the premise, but the end result left me wanting.

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